Days Sixty Two and Sixty Three - Carlsbad, California

Charlie and my cousin Carolynn are in love. She carries him around everywhere. He adores her, too. If her bedroom door is closed in the morning, he whines at me until I let him in there. Then Carolynn carries him downstairs. I'm including these two pictures so you can see how silly this looks. He's almost as big as her!

On Sunday, Carolynn had two basketball games. She's a great player! I love watching her. Her team won both games. After that, we went to dog beach. Carolynn brought her friends, Abby and Emily along. Here's a picture of Emily and Carolynn playing soccer.

Here are Emily, Carolynn, E.J., Abby, and Harper. Cute kids, eh?

Barry is on the right, again in his ridiculous ensemble. Chris, Harper's dad, is on the left. Bear and Chris are in man love, I think. They literally frolicked in the ocean together.

The beach was cold! Can you tell from Jenny's outfit?

Abby, Carolynn, and Emily climbing the rocks at the beach.

As we were leaving, I looked down and saw someone sitting on a pole in the water.

... It was Barry.

After the beach, we went to Besta Wan for dinner. It was freeeezing on the patio, but we braved it. All for the love of Besta Wan, the best beachy restaurant ever. Here Jenny is, demonstrating the temperature.

Tomorrow is Carolynn's 9th birthday! I made her this cake tonight. The inside is purple!

We're leaving on Thursday or Friday and we'll be back on a more adventurous track. I'll be back to blogging more frequently. Theoretically.

Thanks for stopping in!

Days Sixty and Sixty One - SoCal

Here's the photo synopsis from Friday, February 24th and Saturday, February 25th. 

We went to Fiesta Island one day with Charlie. I don't think I'd ever been there before. It was so fun! As we drove across the bridge and onto the island, there were fire pits everywhere for having bonfires on the beach. Then we came around a curve and saw this. There were RVs every fifty or hundred feet. There weren't any official campsites or anything, just people hanging out.

Can you see little Charlie amongst the flowers? The fields were beautiful.

Another "Where's Charlie?" shot, this time in the ocean.

Pretty shot of the moon (by Barry of course).

Day Fifty Nine - La Jolla, California

La Jolla is one of the most upscale beach towns in this area. A lot of celebrities have beach houses there. In honor of the exclusivity, Barry showed up looking like this.

There was a reason he looked like that. We were in La Jolla to go kayaking! Bear loves kayaking. I like sitting in the front of a double kayak while Bear paddles us around. Even with only one of us paddling, we were still way faster than anyone else in our group. This picture is not us. It's from their website. We couldn't bring the camera with us out on the open ocean in case we tipped. Good thing we didn't, because we definitely tipped on the way in. I was starting to feel moderately seasick from sitting in the waves for an hour, but a surprise swim in 50 degree water snapped me out of it! I'd also like to say that these people are about 100 yards closer to the caves than we ever got.

After the kayaking, we went to the top of the cliffs. The view is amazing. Here's one of many pictures we took.

I don't know what these trees are called, but I love them. They're everywhere in La Jolla. 

This is probably the most famous thing in La Jolla. Those are sea lions. There's a natural cove where they swim up onto the beach to get warm. 

Here's the Bear with the sea lions in the background. While we were out kayaking, they were swimming around us. Beautiful.

Another lovely shot of La Jolla.

Days Fifty - Fifty Eight - Carlsbad, California

Hello, my friends! Barry and I are still in California, loving every minute.

Here's a photo wrap up of Tuesday, February 14th through Wednesday, February 22nd.

Bear and I spent a day in Pacific Beach, better known as PB. It's a beach town that's pretty near downtown San Diego. When I lived here, one of my favorite things to do was skip class and go to the thrift shops in PB. While we were hitting them up, we found these fantastic specimens of fashion. They're Constanza shoes. Anyone? Seinfeld references haven't made nearly enough appearances in the old blog.

This lovely framed picture was also in a thrift shop.

This picture of Charlie accurately shows how ridiculously filthy he gets at the beach. Those feet in the background belong to a fleeing beach goer. Charlie pretty much covered them in wet, wet dog scented sand. Mmm.

This photo was taken in Ocean Beach. As you can see (if you happen to have a mirror or at least a mind that works that way), Ocean Beach is widely referred to as OB. It's one of my favorite places ever. It's a hippie, surfer town just south of PB. It has one of the largest off leash dog beaches in Southern California. Pack your bags. Move there. If you don't love it, I'm not sure we can be friends.

Here's little Carolynn walking towards the bridge to the dog beach in Del Mar. She's holding the tennis ball thrower thing that we got for Charlie. As soon as we started playing fetch with him using it, everyone's lives improved. It's super fun and keeps me less disgustingly dirty.

This picture is a winner because of Carolynn's facial expression, the dog bum in the background, and the ocean.

Here's a wider shot of the dog beach. Millions of doggies.

Bear throwing a ball for Charlie.

Doggie on the beach.

Here's an abrupt change of scenery. Barry drove to Big Bear on Tuesday, February 21st to go skiing. Here are some shots he took.

Days Thirty Nine - Forty Nine - Carlsbad, California

Happy Valentine's Day!

I'm terribly sorry. I've been a blog neglecter.

Since we've been in California for a couple weeks and we're not planning to leave for another couple, we haven't been going out and doing extremely exciting things every day. We've been doing a lot, but sometimes it's the same thing several days in a row.

We take Charlie to the dog beach in Del Mar almost every day. He loooves it and we do, too. There are always a ton of dogs running around. Here he is running now! Charlie is in the middle of the three.

To get to dog beach, you park and then walk across this bridge, as my cousin E.J., Charlie, and I are demonstrating here.

This is a view of the beach from the bridge. When the tide is out, you can go around that cliff and walk for awhile.

You'd like to see another video of Charlie, you say? I happen to have millions. Here's a good one of Charlie running like a mad man. Barry also gets in on the running.

Barry and I have spent several hours at Macy's and Target in the last few days. Why would any sane person do that? Wedding registry, of course! I only want to register for a few things. Barry wants to register for everything. He wanted to register for refills for his belt sander. True story. I talked him out of it and he was legitimately huffy with me for ten minutes. Nerd.

We're still planning a trip to Crate and Barrel to register there, but we're probably going to have a few days of trauma counseling first. Haha!

My cousin Chloe went to her formal on Saturday night. This is her on the right. Could she be any prettier? The girl is gorgeous.

Jenny, Barry, and I celebrated Chloe's formal by going to happy hour! Seemed appropriate.

Carolynn, my eight-year-old cousin, beats me at MarioKart a lot. She has characters unlocked that I've never even heard of.

The other day, Carolynn was playing handball in the front yard. Charlie was in the back yard and heard the ball hitting the garage and cried until he let him out in the front. Then he decided he could play handball, too. Here he is getting in the way playing with Carolynn.

I'll have more in a couple days. I woke up with a cold this morning (boo!). My mind is about at the end of coherence.

P.S. I put AdSense on the blog. If you'd like to click on an ad, you'll make us some bucks. Click your hearts out.

Day Thirty Eight - Carlsbad, California

Day Thirty Eight was Saturday, February 4th. Charlotte had a soccer game at 8 a.m. and I went to cheer her on. Bear and Charlie chose to stay in bed :). Since I spent most of the morning half asleep, I didn't get any pictures of the game... The girls won, which means they went on to play another game Sunday morning at 8 a.m.

Jenny and Carolynn drove up to Apple Valley for her soccer tournament. They stayed that night as well since Carolynn's team won their Saturday game. They lost 1-0 on Sunday, but Jenny said that Carolynn played her heart out!

After soccer, Ed had the idea to go to Besta-Wan Pizza House. It's in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, which is one of the super cute coastal towns. It's maybe fifteen minutes from Jen and Ed's house.

One of the coolest things about this place was the dogs. Almost everyone on the patio had brought their dog with them. We had Charlie with us (of course).

Here are Chris and Barry on the patio at Besta-Wan.

Okay. This was a super strange occurrence. When we first got to Besta-Wan, we noticed tons of hula hoops hanging on hooks along the side of the patio. That wasn't normal but it wasn't so weird.

Then, at about 4:30, four children showed up in the parking lot.
Simultaneously.
From different directions.

They proceeded to build these hula hoop cage things. They didn't have to discuss it, apparently, because they were awfully quiet. Methodical.

I kind of forgot about them for a few minutes. The next time I looked up, they were all sitting in the cages in the middle of the parking lot. Creeeepyyy!

Here I am drinking Pacifico out of a mason jar. Sun, palm trees, beer = my jam.

Here's a super cute shot of Charlie.

After we left the pizza place, we went over to the beach and watched the sunset.

And now it's gone.